


sleep inertia

by cruelzy



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Gen, Season/Series 04, but jon def did it, i see the obsession w the word Euclidean and raise a glass, no death tag bc tech only a couple hospital staff bit the dust and it was offscreen, oopsie, statements as lifelines indeed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:34:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26118061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruelzy/pseuds/cruelzy
Summary: Basira is not there when the Archivist wakes.or; jon isn’t conveniently handed sustenance right after his transformation and does a Very Bad Thing
Relationships: Helen | The Distortion & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Michael | The Distortion/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Kudos: 65





	sleep inertia

It’s his name that does it.

Jon knows all too well how horrendous half-based assumptions can become. So he’s careful. He catalogues his chest looping out in waves of ribbon. Painstakingly picks apart the prickling heat of his creaking knees dug into the splinters under the table—long enough for the sensation to numb, but not to disappear. The chair. The table, drowsy and fat where it sits a blink from the ground. A circular cut of shifting phantasm draped in corn yellow cloth that simultaneously clips through matter and also doesn’t. The yellow splits from the corn as he watches, and Jon finds he isn’t in the least surprised when the table’s feet begin enthusiastically pulling strips of green from the stalks to reveal the glistening surface beneath—

There is a watch clasped around his wrist. He doesn’t look at it. Instead, Jon focuses sharply inward, flexes his fingers one by one until the familiar flush of smoldering intimacy that only really comes from knowing oneself rips through him like a typhoon. 

Half an hour at most. Perhaps less. Awareness trickles in scant, a few pathetic drops of honey in a ravenous pit, _empty_ , and Jon is suddenly aware that he has been sitting directly in this spot for twenty-one minutes and forty seven seconds while talking up a storm. 

_Great,_ he thinks, and that’s that. 

Wouldn’t be the first his back was against the wall. Attempting to recall what he’s said for the past half hour, however, is nearly impossible. 

Nearly. 

The memory wiggles itself evasively out of his grasp; a worm; a slippery, bloodless thing; a conversation one has been hearing but not listening to; a lurching retch flopped out of his mouth onto the table with a wet slap. Body outside body. For a moment, Jon feels something like a shirt turned head hole over. Inside out. 

Working compulsion on himself tends to be Russian roulette on the best of days, but it’s second nature how viciously the mental cord whips out, and, lightning quick, _twists_. 

Stars burst brightly on the backs of his lids. 

_“Not quite, Jon.”_

Jon. 

Not Archivist. Jon. 

The impression of his name and the significance of its meaning is a tangible thing, anchoring him for that minuscule second, that split taste of reality that completely jars him from the disorder. Jon thinks about clarity in illusion, about Agnes and a hairline of doubt and the reversal. He thinks about the way his name sounds on Elias’ lips: patient, dispassionate; Basira’s, hard and displeased; Daisy, a warhead of misplaced ire; sincere and disappointed Georgie; Melanie in all shades of Tim and rage and crimsoned storm; Martin, _Martin,_ a stronghold, a passing flash of a lighthouse over unending sea—

The Distortion. If he believed in spells and the like, Jon would say that this one just about eviscerated the second it said his name. But Jonathan Sims does not believe in magic, obviously, because even now, Jonathan is a practical man. The being that calls itself Michael is not a practical anything. And it has never once called him by name.

Not to mention there is, of course, the obvious. Michael is dead. 

Though it would seem that didn’t keep.

Jon wonders in the midst of shrill clarity if it’s sweet that he remembered Michael’s mannerisms before he remembered its state of literal non-existence. Partial existence? Reform? 

Jon really doesn’t care.

The Archivist does.

Fake Michael seems to be observing him with a hovering amusement, not especially detached, but catching on his edges like hooks, licking at him in continuous leathery static. Jon says nothing. Once upon a time he might have been bursting at the seams, near rocking out of his seat with indignant demands of _How did you get here? How did I? Where is here, specifically?_ Once, he might have nearly blacked out with fear but asked anyway. He still is. Fearful. But the Archivist isn’t the person he once was. Even as he is. Even as he will always be. A meaningless, circular thought—one he can’t quite fully blame on the nature of the Spiral. Jon learns and expands. He is that version of himself the way a stamp leaves an impression on wax, the way the sea leaves its shape in the shallow of the sand, distinctive, but inconsequential. Jon is not so simply less of what he was than he is more of something else now. So he watches, and says nothing. 

Michael shivers under his crushing gaze. It is not an expression of apprehension, no; rather, there lies a long, greedy pleasure in its twisting. 

Jon considers. He watches the bemused, static stare. The expectant fraying into dizzying fractals and spaces overlapping interference on each other like a film out of sync but on its face, when there is a face, and if the reverberating walls didn’t betray the fact that he was somehow truly in the Spiral’s domain, the ridiculous lack of care for a human guise would. It considers him right back. Jon suddenly intimately knows Michael could outlast a stalemate until the universe goes heat dead as he knows the very hairs on his head. 

He sighs softly.

The world, the pocket outside reality, whereverwhatever this is, holds its breath all at once.

A wicked unforgiving blade of _something_ descends solidly on his back. Michael has grown sharper as well, a shifting haunt of mazes and bedlam curves that sets Jon’s teeth trembling in their hollows. Whatever Jon says in the next immediate moment, he knows if he speaks carelessly, he will never see Michael again.

“Where are my shoes?” Jon asks.

Michael smiles.

The bruising pressure doesn’t snap more than it noticeably lessens. Michael reclines in its rickety chair, a jutting, unholy movement that has Jon’s eyes instinctively sliding off, refusing what should _not,_ only to be forced back by raw grit. 

Goodness. He would’ve expected his own newfound...changes...to level the playing field, but Michael seems to have grown substantially more confounding than when Jon was still a bumbling wreck of hard-headed naivety. _Somehow._ Is it just that? That Michael has undergone another revolutionary transformation? Or is it simply because Jon can See it more clearly now than he ever had been able to? 

Michael hums slowly, with considerable weight. Jon digs his nails into his palms.

“Chamomile,” it says, “or peppermint?”

Ah.  
  
Why does he even bother.

Blatant irritation suffuses through the air like smoke, heavy and bitter. Michael laughs. 

Point for Real Michael then, Jon thinks somewhat feverishly, flinching back as it descends into a familiar trip of giggles, seismic and righteous, echoing all around him and humming under his fingernails. He is assaulted with images of a hollowed church bell splintering in a shower of metal, ripped of all coherence. The sound builds and builds until something dislodges below his temples, drips tight out of his ears. 

A hundred statements spring into Jon’s grasp like a neatly filed cabinet. 

_Do not trust what you hear, what you smell, what you see. Run, for the love of God. Run. Your very senses will deceive you._

Jonathan refuses to make assumptions, but he submits to the admittance that nothing and no one could ever fully mimic that laugh, creature of deception or not.

“Is there a problem?” False curiosity slithers through its voice, undercut by glee. “Am I not allowed questions?”

“Ones that make sense, maybe,” says Jon, disgruntled, “Though I guess that would be difficult for something like you.”

“Difficult,” it repeats. “Well that is quite unfair. Have I ever lied to you, Archivist?”

Jon decides not to grant _that_ a response. 

He keeps his stare fixated on Michael’s eyes, its hands. The rest of it just...isn’t. Warping and twisting in on itself, sanity contorted wherever it came into contact like beams of light refracted on water, pouring higher imagery into his mind in a cascade of frigid sensation: a hall of mirrors, a thousand blood slicked stairs; a mocking undulation of moist clay, a spinning earth inside a picture frame. The hands aren’t either, but at least they’ve remained largely the same—bulbous, razor sharp, but familiar. And the eyes, well. Those are Jon’s territory.

A swift sweep of the area provides what he discerned earlier—an enclosed room of wall and floor that flickered into never ending hallways when he wasn’t peering closely, and a carpet that felt like breathing skin underneath his bare feet. No exits.

So, he tries again. “Who are you?” 

“We’ve been down this road before,” it tells him easily. 

Jon presses his palms into his open eyes, not taking them off its form. He doesn’t think he’s blinked once since he woke from his stupor. The anger hardens into a chrysalis and Jon accepts it without reservation. Jon gets angry often. Jon sustains anger because otherwise he becomes distressed, and that helps no one. “You’re not answering my questions.” 

The smile grows wider. “Was that a question?” 

At which point is it acceptable to inquire about one’s agonizing death before killing them yourself? 

A perpendicular wrenching motion shifts the ceiling to the floor, tossing his organs upside down without moving him at all. His lungs squeeze pitifully. The average lung capacity, Jon knows for no reason whatsoever, is about six litres of air. An elevation of about 20,000 feet above sea level breaches the maximum height at which sufficient oxygen exists for the human lungs to sustain tidal breathing. Michael Crew had taken him significantly higher than that when he’d dropped him through the sky. The hemorrhage should gnash him apart to this very moment. It doesn’t.

He is one breath away from caving in his skull on the edge of the table when Michael leans forward, unhurriedly, as if giving him room to react. Jon holds himself completely still, unsure of its intentions but succinctly aware that protesting would likely accomplish nothing regardless. As it is, he can only catch his breath in his throat as it cups his chin.

“Desperate was always a good look on you,” Michael sighs, scraping incomprehensibly sharp fingers down the side of his face. Its marked path disrupts a smattering of discoloured worm scars that scab over even before it’s finished picking them open. It hurts. But Jon expected that. “And yet, different now, I imagine. How very...fascinating,” it strokes a knife-like finger over his bottom lip almost affectionately. “Who are _you_ , Archivist? Would you like to find out?”

Jon swallows hard against the grip round his throat. There’s a quip floating on the tip of his tongue, petty and petulant, but Michael, Michael is—no, _Jon_ is spiralling. His visión has grown increasingly spotted, swimming with black, and the _music,_ its four-on-the-floor beats and synthesizers a relentless tortured wail in the depths of his eardrums, bassline a discordant harmony bordering on frenzy against the horns. He would be bereft to suspect the Slaughter if he didn’t know its elk, and the Stranger’s circus machinations are so deeply engraved in his consciousness that, frankly, he would be offended if he managed to mistake that one for the rest of his life. Jon tips over curling in a shudder so bone-deep it locks all movement in place for one terrifying, surgical moment. His core quivers, _opens out,_ like the quivering maw of a newborn, and Jon chokes above the frantic pounding of his heart in his rib cage. 

“I’m dying,” he realizes, watching a thick glob of blackened blood drip and splatter from his nose onto his thigh.

“Yes,” Michael agrees. 

“I-I don’t—” 

“No? I suspect you do.” Jon sways limply to the side and it shifts its hold to follow, joints bending in all the wrong places. “You made a choice. You are always making choices, although I’m certain this one was entirely willing. And in full understanding of the consequences, at that.” There’s a smile in its tone. “It is only to be expected. You do so often seek that which would harm you.”

Jon _moves_. His hands fly upward to dig nails into the arms keeping him captive with enough force that were it anyone besides the creature now mounting his lap, he would’ve been met with blood and sinew. As it is, only a pliable numbness spreads up through his fingers and into his palms, all perception of feeling disappearing into pins and needles. If Jon couldn’t still see his hands with his own eyes, he’d think them detached from his wrists.

“ _Answer me,_ ” he snarls through his teeth, gasping.

Michael knots a hand into his sweaty hair and yanks his head back to expose his throat, wrenching a keening yelp from Jon’s bitten lips. “If you want answers, Archivist,” it suggests, branding lines of blinding pain down his scalp, “then you need to start asking the right questions.”

Hook and line and sinker. 

Want gone sour. Want wedged between molars, a bitter kernel of Other. Cat. Canary. Cream. The Prince, clutching miserably to a humanity bartered for more time. The Curious Prince dessicated, bait bitten. Plunging headfirst into crooked desire. 

The Archivist asks, “Am I speaking to Helen or Michael?”

Michael croons into the prickly stubble dotting his jaw, altogether too eldritch to bear witness to anymore. Nauseating. The Archivist looks anyway, but not with the two eyes in his head. “You and your categories,” it says lazily. “If it helps you check the box, I am proficient at neither.”

That doesn’t make sense. But Michael is the embodiment of doesn’t make sense, and so, in a way, it is exactly what he expected.

“Alright,” says the Archivist. “Hospital gown.”

“Yes.”

“And these are your corridors.”

“Hm? How do you figure?”

The bland response, so innocent in its absurdity, startles Jon back to himself.

And right into an involuntary bark of laughter. 

He very admirably attempts to maintain a face worthy of his previous severity, but Michael is in the process of not having one again, and the level of ludicrous multiplies tenfold. 

“We,” Jon clears his throat, incredulous, “we aren’t exactly in my flat.”

“An astute observation,” says Michael. That, pointedly, receives a very flippant eyeroll. “Well done. Though you are incorrect, of course. No, where you are is considerably more.... intimate.”

Something in its cadence reminds him starkly of another conversation from what seemed a lifetime ago: of hands, and stomachs. 

Jon blanches.

“Good lord. You’re not implying I’m in your _heart?_ ” 

His glasses’ chain pendulums in his periphery as Michael playfully glides its hands over him, altogether _far_ too comfortable on its perch straddling his thighs. The jagged fissure of its mouth now resembles the serrated edge of a saw, broken upwards into its graceful tilting head of blithe white blonde. “Ahh, now _that_ is a question, Archivist.”

“How—but your _door_ , would that not entail—No.”

Jon scowls. He recognizes this tactic, knows what it’s weaving: a never ending trail of vague suppositions that don’t particularly lead anywhere, using his own self-sabotaging thirst for knowledge in order to prolong such senseless meandering. 

Let it not be said that the Eye and the Spiral were not alike. Elias and Michael proved acutely diametric monsters indeed. 

“No,” Jon declares firmly. Static splices his voice to a crystalline thunder. “How long have I been here?”

“ _Ooh_ ,” says Michael, brows flung high in a pantomime of melodramatics. It coils around the compulsion like a corkscrew, dulling the effect to that correspondent of a suggestion. But a vehement suggestion indeed. “As if it matters,” it concedes, nonplussed. “Not here, at any rate. Beyond The Twisting Deceit? Perhaps two minutes. I do not think we should make it three. Your Watcher is... _possessive._ ” 

“My Wa— _Elias_ could not care less about my wellbeing, I assure you,” Jon snaps bitterly. The words taste weirdly slanted on his tongue, as though his patron detests any complication, those not-quite truths, but Jon is far past caring. His head pounds behind his eyes, each hard throb of what is unmistakably not a pulse bowing him over, pushing him closer into Michael who visibly delights in his disgust. Jon _needs…_ he’s not certain what he needs. He needs Michael to stop touching him. He needs Michael to never stop touching him. Heavens, Jon hasn’t been touched, been _held_ in so long and the contact is—he’s—a feather-light brush alone would’ve had him quivering apart at the seams and the Distortion is not gentle, far from, is merciless in its needlepoint strength carving him bloody, thoroughly marking its claim as though it craves to Know him as intimately as Jon craves to Know everything.

Most of all, Jon needs to _take—_ and he can’t from Michael. Not anymore. It’s no longer concrete enough to be palatable. 

“Helen,” he manages, unaware of how his teeth bare into Michael’s neck. 

“Stole you away.”

“Yes,” Jon murmurs. Bemberg skirt and heels. A whispered grin in his ear. _Not quite, Jon._

“And then?”

“She lost you.” Michael flickers in and out of focus like a faulty radio signal, blurring into swirls of rutilant colour around that persistent smile. “Or rather, you did not get lost. Tricky little Archivist. Not so little anymore, I don’t think so. Redesigned. You’ve cracked open from your shell like a new creation, and, well, you are Sight. Helen underestimated you.” The mania declines, turning it’s countenance grave for a blunt second, before disappearing. “Oh she knows where you are now of course. I suspect she merely has not intervened because, hmm,” here it regards him unwaveringly; “she’s _curious_.” 

“I—” Another full blown shudder wracks Jon’s form, interrupting his next line of questioning. This time, he is locked in place for what seems an excruciating infinity. 

Then a low dragging sound, like glass on gravel, ragged and inhuman, _storage-process-interpret—_

Jon lugs his head back up to see Michael staring unabashedly at him, and it looks almost sad. 

“I don’t understand,” Jon rasps, _begs_. “I’ve been this tenure of hungry before, but this is—”

“Torture?” it offers, drawing the pattern of a winding eye slick through the blood on his cheek. Jon moans. “Poor thing. It’s a remarkable feat the little nurses left your room alive.” That is most certainly a lie, and it doesn't even attempt to hide it. “Although you must be recuperating to some degree now that I am actually answering your questions.”

“What.” Jon growls. He seethes, anything to push aside the implication that he’d—that people had—“If you _knew_ why would you—”

“I was curious,” sneers Michael. 

Jon’s mouth goes dry. 

“You are enthralling,” it condemns, its tone, formerly placid, now sinister, echoing around the walls through the void of not-air into the lump of gray matter in his skull, amplified by the deadened numbness in his limbs that’s, truthfully, becoming quite worrying. No creature was meant to endure such an extended exposure to a manifestation of insanity without fittingly becoming unhinged itself. “You _enthrall_ us, Archivist.” Long, coiling strands of blonde brush along Jon’s lashes, tumbling over his shoulders and past his ears till they create a curtain of separation, a vacuous partition against the world in which only he and Michael exist. Everything that is not now, that is not this, vanishes into obscurity. Rendered irrelevant under the cosmic orbit spun into motion crashing them together. 

Michael clasps his jaw and speaks resolutely in a seraphic wave of sound that transcends language, that utterly rips his mind’s door off its hinges, sending him whole and unprepared into The Beholding.  
  
Jon unravels.

He drowns and swells and pops into dust and gas and roaring light. He reaches right past the distortion to its center. It seizes him and Jon shreds it to pieces underneath his all-seeing gaze; void breath hot up the column of his throat, on his tongue, maelstrom eyes bottomless and incandescent and churning.

“...That’s hardly my fault,” is all he can whisper against its lips. 

The thing that calls itself Michael and is not, because all Michaels are gone, falters, well-crafted mask shifting just slightly, and for a solitary instant Jon

sees hell

A euclidean labyrinth of

impossible geometry and unfathomable angles that eternally turn right and

do not

.meet in a center   
All hallucinations,

every single one of them

and serpentine fractals,

and rotting wood, 

and rippling error, and

illusion,

and pipe-dreams, and 

Wretchedness, and Despair,

andbeastlyhues   
huesanddelphic   
shadesthat   
_do not exist  
_ thathave   
nonames, thathis  
brainrejectsandvomitsand   
worships   
inconjuncti   
  
o   
n

Jon is alone.

No. But Michael has returned to its seat across the table, uncharacteristically silent.

He feels cold. “Micha—”

“Ask your Questions, Archivist,” it says, flat and emotionless. “Your time is up.” 

Jon is ashamed at how hungrily he inhales through his teeth. 

_“How did you escape your own becoming?”_

“I didn’t.” Michael looks as if it knows exactly what this is about. “Do take that as a lesson.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Unbearably.”

A yellow door creaks open at Jon’s feet. The front entrance to the Magnus Institute bustles noisily beyond. 

“Chamomile or peppermint,” Jon insists. “What does that mean?”

Michael blinks. “You are fond of tea, are you not? It was meant to be a comfort. You didn’t even spare it a glance. How rude.”

Jon starts. He dips his head, and—sure enough, a perfectly undisturbed cup of tea lay on the table mat before him. How could he possibly have missed that?

Out of everything, this disquiets him the most. Michael had wanted to—what? Comfort him? 

Sinking heat flutters in his abdomen, an emotion he does not want to name.

“ _Why?_ ” 

A shrug.

“Who can say?”

Jon splutters, and Michael _laughs_.

“Come now, Archivist,” it smiles, charismatic and rich. Before he can react it’s in front of him, a hand that has lost all sharpness pressed warm and taunting to his chest. “When will you learn I do not have to tell you anything?”

Then it shoves him through the door, and Jon falls up.

**Author's Note:**

> the level of nonsense that is the typical hallmark of tma canon lends well to every and all interpretation and for that I am thankful


End file.
